Culture & Society

Growing inequality and the corruption of leaders have split our society apart. Neoliberalism has become an intolerable ideology for the majority of people. For some that is because they suffer its consequences in their own lives. For others it is because the ideology subtly reduces them to individual consumers whose only value is being interchangeable numbers instead of persons. This is causing a great sense of unease throughout the world. In spite of this reality, the framework that we propose chooses hope, a hope based on the conviction that it is necessary to forge new bonds. This is our challenge as we begin a new year.

Racism is something more profound than the explicit prejudices and stereotypes expressed by intolerant or reactionary individuals. That is to say, discrimination is not just a question of people who are bigoted. Discrimination is inevitably produced by a system that classifies and grades persons and peoples. Such a system calls into question the humanity of persons or behaviors that are different from those of the supposedly ideal modern subject, namely, the white, well-off, heterosexual male. Rather than understand racism from an individual and/or moral perspective, as a question of intolerant people, we understand it as part of a political, economic, cultural, and social system that arises from the very model of society that we live in.

End-of-Year Reflection

As we conclude 2018, menacing clouds hang over our democracies. The globalization of authoritarianism appears to be suffocating our hopes for progressively more humane societies. Are we able to believe that, despite the dark shadows, the sun is still there?

After  the novel and the film called “The Da Vinci Code”, the Gospel of Judas, that is a text quite pleasant, appears among best sellers books. The sales of  “The Da Vinci Code” are countless. Is this fact singe of  intrinsic values, of exciting curiosity, or of citizens vulnerability in front of medias? This booklet tries to answer all these questions.

We take leave of the year 2016 with a long list of unresolved problems, to which new ruptures keep getting added. The pain keeps increasing, and the deaths of so many “saints Innocents” threaten to eclipse whatever hopes are engendered by the “birth” of many initiatives of solidarity. Those of us at Cristianisme i Justícia want to make a plea for dialogue and debate so as to keep from advancing toward the precipice. For, despite all the evidence, our faith in humanity and in what is most sacred therein encourages us to believe that we can help to turn the tide.

This is the end-of-year reflection elaborated by Cristianisme i Justícia. In the text we point out both the points we consider most worrisome in the present economic and political situation and some of the hopeful signs that should help us overcome these difficult circumstances. Faced with the danger of moving toward a “scenario of even greater poverty and inequality,” we feel an urgent need to seek out more just ways of organizing society.